Singapore’s government services: Meeting rising expectations

The Singapore government remains a world leader in citizen service quality, according to its citizens in the ServiceNow Customer Experience Report Public Sector. However, the nation faces ongoing pressure to maintain this lead by balancing growing expectations for service speed and quality with demographics shifts driving digital services.

The report highlights the changing nature of government services and what technologies such as AI can do to help the public sector make higher-quality citizen experiences the norm. Let’s look at some of the findings.

Staying close to the next generation

Our research reiterates the exceptional strength of Singapore’s citizen services, with more Singaporeans preferring the government’s service experience to that offered by businesses compared to last year.

Customer service agents we interviewed named government over any other sector as providing Singapore’s best quality service. That reputation for high-quality experience remains crucial to maintaining trust from the public and continuing to attract the best customer service talent.

Despite, or perhaps because of, this reputation, 41% of Singaporeans say their expectations of government citizen experience have risen in the past 12 months. And Singapore’s youngest citizens are increasingly likely to challenge the quality of government experience: Our research found 21% of Singaporean Gen Zers prefer the customer experience offered by business over that of government, more than any other demographic we studied.

That emphasizes the need for Singapore’s government to continually review and assess fresh approaches to citizen experience design and delivery, informed by a deep understanding of different generations’ needs.

Accelerating service with AI

One constant across all Singaporean demographics is “the need for speed.” Our research found that 47% of Singaporeans want government customer service officers to resolve issues faster, while 49% want to spend less time on hold or queueing for help. The top areas of inquiry are health, employment, and finance—all crucial areas where expedited service can make a difference to overall experience.

When citizens don’t have their issues resolved quickly, nearly half say their stress levels increase. This doesn’t help the country’s significant mental health challenges, especially among youth.

The public sector can use AI to automate and offer self-service help for simple citizen requests, such as supplying basic information or assistance. AI can help summarize customers’ issues, automate the flow of information between systems, and coordinate the steps required for swift resolution.

For more complex issues, such as those crossing multiple ministries or statutory boards, agencies must unify systems on an integrated platform to help ensure both AI and human agents work together on customer issues quickly, seamlessly, and satisfactorily.

Taking this approach to AI would align well with existing government efforts to aid public servants with generative AI assistants, as well as meeting strong support from the 44% of customer service agents who are already excited to improve how they work using generative AI.

However, AI and automated self-service solutions will also need to be supported by an end-to-end platform that bridges operational silos, unifies agency workflows, and integrates with real-time data sources. This has been one focal point for ServiceNow’s ongoing collaboration with Singapore’s public sector, as well as the rationale behind the upcoming ServiceNow Protected Platform for government agencies to enhance service with purpose-built AI.

The public may want speed, but strong data and process foundations are crucial to keeping government services steady under pressure at ever-increasing velocity.

Increasing access or alienating?

An end-to-end platform can also help address an increasingly common challenge: Citizens aren’t getting the “one government” experience they expect. Only 32% of Singaporeans rate government service accessibility as high, with younger generations such as Gen Z and millennials the least likely to rate government accessibility as high.

Beyond government, Singaporeans are struggling to adapt to new technologies such as AI in their everyday experiences. Half (51%) say they don’t know how to use organizations’ technology service options, while 34% worry that AI chatbots won’t be able to translate self-service resources into different levels of understanding for different groups of people.

Singapore’s government has the data needed to build experiences that more closely align with different personas among its citizens. And its past efforts to make services more accessible to different demographics, such as seniors, appear to be achieving their results. Baby boomers, the oldest of the groups surveyed, were also the most likely to praise the high accessibility of Singapore’s government services.

With a unified platform to consolidate citizen data and literally govern the complexities of service delivery across channels and personas, the public sector can rise to the challenges of an ever-changing, ever-growing Singapore.

Find out more about Singapore’s public sector service trends in the full government report.